Arroyo de la Muerte

by Frank Leslie

  “Honey, please!” her father called in wheedling tone behind her. “Listen to reason. It’s a cold, hard world out there. You need the right man to take care of you!”

  Julia fumbled the door open.

  “John Clare Hopkins is the man for you, sweetheart!” Hugh Kosgrove yelled as she hurried into the hall and pulled the door closed behind her.

  Placing a hand to her head again, Julia staggered as though drunk, running up against the wall opposite her father’s room. Her head pounded, and her insides churned. Her father’s voice echoed around inside her brain: “You need the right man to take care of you!”

  Did she? Is that really what she needed? Did she need to be cared for more than loved?

  She couldn’t help agreeing with her father’s exasperation at the fact of her and Emma having fallen in love with the same man. She’d been trying to push that unruly, prickly fact to the back of her mind, because it got in the way of her true feelings for Yakima, but now it was right there in front of her again, complicating her thoughts.

  Again, she saw them in her imagination’s overly keen eye—toiling together in his roughhewn bed in that humble adobe shack of his out in the Sierra Estrada.

  “You all right, Miss Julia?”

  She lowered her hand and was surprised to see another half-dressed young doxie moving toward her sleepily, her hair in her eyes, her lampblack and rouge badly sleep-smeared. It was Candace Jo coming up from the kitchen with a steaming mug of coffee in her hands.

  Julia feigned a smile. “Just a little too early after a long night is all.”

  The girl scrutinized Julia skeptically then smiled her gap-toothed smile and started to turn away.

  “Hold on.” Julia grabbed the girl’s arm and turned her back toward her. Candace’s left eye was slightly discovered. Julia brushed her thumb across the discoloration. “What happened here?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing.”

  “It isn’t nothing,” Julia said, her anger rising. “What happened, Candace? Who did this?”

  “Ah, I don’t wanna say, Miss Julia. Please, don’t make me.”

  “Who?”

  “Please, I…”

  “Candace, you need to tell me. My clients know very well my rules. They know that if they step out of line, they will be cut off and barred from the premises!”

  “He didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

  “Who, Candace?” Julia asked again, firmly.

  Candace gave a pained expression. “It was just one of the miners…you know…one of the boys who works for Mister Hamms out at the Periwinkle. I don’t even know his name.”

  “Mister Hamms, huh? All right. I will have a talk with Mister Hamms.”

  “It’s all right, Miss Julia. Really it is. The boy just got a little frustrated, is all. He’d had too much to drink.”

  “They can get frustrated all they want, but when they take it out on my girls, they get cut off.”

  Julia felt motherly toward the girls who worked in her and her father’s employ. Pleasing men was a nasty business. It meant you had to submit to them, which was dangerous. Especially in the boom town Apache Springs had become. Julia didn’t like running such a business, but if she didn’t serve as madam to the young doxies here at the Conquistador, her father would only hire someone else—possibly someone who didn’t have Julia’s concern and well-being for the girls foremost in her mind.

  Besides, the eight girls who worked for her here at the hotel had become her family, of sorts. She felt closer to them than she did in many ways to her own sister and even her father. She was like an older sister to her covey of doves, though some were nearly as old as she was at twenty-eight.

  “Take a hot bath,” Julia told Candace. “And remember—if anyone gets rough with you, you come and see me right away. You don’t have to stand for that, Candace. I won’t have you standing for it. Understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Run along.”

  The girl hurried off down the hall in her bare feet, pink chemise, and white pantaloons.

  Julia drew a deep breath and closed her eyes, trying to calm herself. What a morning it had been so far. Not only was her mind in turmoil, but her body had been so ready for Yakima’s big, masculine body earlier that she felt physically frustrated, as well, adding to her general malaise.

  What she needed was a cup of coffee. She’d had only a few sips of her father’s.

  She strode on down the hall then down the broad staircase to the first story where the steady hum of conversation rose around her, as did the clinking of forks on plates. She was pleased to see that the large main saloon hall on both sides of the big, horseshoe-shaped bar were occupied by breakfasting businessmen and traveling drummers.

  Several men in business suits passed Julia on the stairs as they returned to their upstairs rooms, nodding to her, smiling, pinching the brims of their bowler hats, letting their furtive eyes linger over her figure. She was well aware that her body was pleasing to men.

  She’d known that for a long time, for she’d matured early, so she’d learned long ago how to parry such attentions. She’d grown up sheltered out at the Conquistador mine, in her father’s sprawling Spanish-style casa, but he’d sent her to finishing school for several years back east. He’d sent Emma, as well, though due to poor grades and innate rebelliousness, Julia’s younger sister had been kicked out and sent home. Now Emma rode around the desert on green-broke stallions—a green-broke girl riding broom-tailed cayuses hither and yon, not a care in the world, nor a responsibility. She was a horseback, flaxen-haired siren.

  A seductress of men as untamed and untamable as Emma herself was…

  Julia flared a nostril in general annoyance at her sister. She stepped up to the bar and asked the morning barman, Ivor Ingersoll, for a cup of coffee. Ingersoll had just set three coffees on the tray of one of the serving girls, and added a jigger of brandy to each.

  “That’s a good idea,” Julia said. “Why don’t you pay mine the same compliment?”

  “All right.” Ingersoll turned away to pour coffee from a large urn on the backbar. He cast Julia a smile over his shoulder. “Long night, Miss Julia?”

  Julia flushed. More like a hard morning, for she hadn’t had her ashes hauled by the man she’d wanted to haul them. She wondered if a man could read sexual frustration in a woman’s face.

  “You could say that,” was all she muttered as the barman set the china cup of coffee onto a saucer before her, and splashed Spanish brandy into it.

  “Now, that’s what the doctor ordered!”

  The voice had come from behind her, rising above the general hum of the morning diners. Julia looked over her shoulder to see none other than John Clare Hopkins striding up behind her, smiling in his oily way, long dark lashes dropping down over his confident--some might even say arrogant--brown eyes.

  “Indeed.” Julia smiled at the tall, handsome man in his customary, tailor-made three-piece suit, celluloid collar, and black foulard tie. “Good morning, John. How are you?”

  “Absolutely splendid. The bed in my room must have been made my God himself. I always sleep so well when I stay here at the Conquistador.” Indeed, the English investor stayed at the Conquistador whenever he was in Apache Springs, and he’d been here for quite a while now—several months. That was a good bit of time for a man so moneyed, adventurous, and fiddle-footed. “The place is so well run. Your people see to my every need.”

  “Well, that’s what we’re here for,” Julia said, smiling as she sipped her coffee. She glanced behind him. He’d come from a table set against the wall, beneath the snarling head of a grizzly and to the right of a cabinet clock. Three other men encircled the table, which surprised Julia somewhat. John Clare Hopkins was usually a solitary breakfaster.

  Turning his handsome head, Hopkins followed her gaze. “Ah—yes. You see I have company. Why don’t you step over and meet the horde?”

  “The horde?”

  “Yes, that’s what I call them
. The Wild Limey Horde.” Hopkins threw his head back and laughed beneath his thick brown mustache as he led Julia over to the table at which four other men sat, their eyes now scouring Julia with customary male interest, fawning smiles pulling at their mouths.

  Formally, Hopkins dipped his chin, rose up and down on the heels of his polished half boots, and said, “Miss Julia Taggart, won’t you meet my younger brother, Ferrell Hopkins?”

  The younger Hopkins smiled and gave a cordial bow over his empty breakfast platter and coffee cup. He was a redhead, and more delicately structured than John Clare, but Sheila could see a definite family resemblance in the features and builds of the two Hopkins men.

  “Beside him there,” continued the older Hopkins, going around the table clockwise, “is our friend the Irishman Liam Peale. The tall rascal with the ridiculous mustachios is the venerable Brian McKenzie—a vile-tempered Scott!” he added behind his hand to Julia in a feigned whisper. The others chuckled while McKenzie grinned and raised a shot glass to his mouth, which was, indeed, mantled with a most impressive, coal-black mustache.

  Hopkins said, “Completing this chummy and virile quartet is last but not least H. Bennett “Milo” Cartwright. Don’t ask me where the Milo came from, but that is what everyone calls him so Milo it is, indeed.”

  “Miss Taggart,” said Cartwright with a cordial nod of his own. “It is my deepest pleasure.” He sat nearest Julia--close enough, in fact, to take her hand in his own pale one, lift it to his mouth, and pressed his lips to it. The moistness of his mouth made Julia recoil inwardly slightly, but she smiled and, removing her hand from Cartwright’s said, “Why, thank you, sir.” With a smiling, sidelong glance up at John Clare Hopkins, she said, “But it’s Mrs. Taggart. I’m a widow.”

  “Oh, what a shame!” said the Scott, McKenzie, furling his heavy black brows. “And such a young widow, at that.” His large dark eyes drifted to her bodice.

  “Her husband was the town marshal of Apache Springs,” Hopkins explained to his friends. “He was killed…as I understand…by one of the nastiest pack of curly wolves the American frontier has ever seen.”

  Julia found something somewhat discomfiting, if not vaguely jeering, in the man’s tone. In fact, she found a similar quality to the obsequious gazes of the other men at the table—a vague mockery perhaps of not only her but her deceased husband and the entire frontier West, which they seemed to regard with the mock seriousness of men who saw the world as merely a series of playgrounds provided for their amusement and entertainment.

  She might have merely been feeling a little thin-skinned after her experience—or lack thereof—with Yakima earlier, followed so closely by the nearly as frustrating conversation with her badgering, tyrannical father. Be that as it may, she wanted very much only to return to the bar and to her spiced coffee, which she so desperately needed right now.

  Ignoring Hopkins’ last comment and wanting merely to end the conversation with a polite query, Julia beamed her winning, businesswoman’s smile, and asked, “So, what, gentlemen, brings you all to Apache Springs?” She glanced at Hopkins standing beside her. “Don’t tell me you’ve all come so far to join the gold-seekers?”

  A curious flush touched John Clare Hopkins’s cheeks. A similar one found its way into the finer, paler face of his smaller, younger, less handsome brother, who smiled stiffly and raised his own shot glass to his mouth. The other men glanced at each other, vaguely duplicitous.

  “Friendship,” John Clare Hopkins said, a little more loudly than was necessary. “Just friendship…mainly. But, of course, we’re all businessmen here, and that means we’re always on the scout for investment opportunities.”

  “I see,” Julia said, feeling a little baffled by the men’s stiff reactions to her question. She herself was too distracted by her own problems to probe any further. By way of politely breaking off the conversation, she said, “Allow me to welcome you to Apache Springs in general and to my father’s grand hotel, the Conquistador Inn. I do hope your stay here will be comfortable and rewarding, and if there’s anything I can do to help in that regard, please let me know. I’m almost always on the premises, mostly running around like a chicken with my head cut off!”

  She feigned a laugh at the tedious joke and began to turn back to the bar. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

  “Thank you, Miss Taggart,” intoned Ferrell Hopkins over the rim of his half-filled shot glass.

  “Nice to meet you, Miss Taggart,” said the man called Cartwright.

  The other two men nodded at her in parting. As she headed back toward the bar, John Clare Hopkins followed her closely, gently closing his hand around her arm, stopping her before she could reach her longed-for coffee and brandy.

  “Uh…Julia?” he said, hesitating and fashioning an unctuous smile. “I was wondering if you’d consider having dinner with me this evening. Perhaps drinks with me and the others”—he canted his head toward his brother and friends and/or business associates—“and then dinner…just the two of us?”

  His smile broadened with gentle beseeching.

  “Oh.” Julia wasn’t sure what to say. She was really in no mood to be romanced by anyone other than…

  Just then she saw him out one of the saloon’s two large front windows—Yakima Henry riding an unfamiliar horse into Julia’s view, from her right. He rode slumped a little in his saddle, pressing his gloved left hand against what appeared a bloody wound in his left side. He rode on the far side of the newly laid tracks, obscured by sunlit dust rising from the hooves and wheels of riders and wagons passing in both directions along the street.

  Yakima was leading two horses by their bridle reins. A dead man lay belly down over the back of each saddled horse, though all Julia could see of the men was their legs and boots. Their arms and heads hung down the horses’ far sides.

  “Julia…?” Hopkins said, frowning at her with a vague annoyance.

  “Oh, dear,” she muttered, backing away from John Clare Hopksins. “I’m sorry, John. I’ll have to give you my answer later!”

  She swung around and hurried to the front door.

  Chapter 6

  “Marshal!”

  Galveston Penny came down off the jailhouse’s front stoop and ran into the street, the finely churned powder of dust and horse apples wafting up around his ankles. He squinted against the midday sun as he gazed up at Yakima then looked past the half-breed lawman riding the young deputy’s own horse, to the two dead men lying belly down over the saddles of the two horses in Yakima’s pack string.

  “Well, you got ‘em both, I see,” said young Penny. “Got ‘em good. There any life left in either of ‘em?”

  Yakima swung down from the zebra dun’s back. “Nope.”

  Galveston grabbed a bridle cheek strap and caressed the dun’s snout with affection, smiling proudly. “How did old Zeb do? He do all right for you? He come up from Texas with me—a gift from an old rancher I worked for. They said he was old and no good anymore, but he’s been a right steady trail mount for me.”

  Yakima glanced from Galveston to the older horse, who’d left him high and dry after Mankiller and Guzman had opened up on him. After the marshal had killed both killers, he’d looked around for the horse, but it had disappeared, likely frightened off by the gunfire. It had reappeared behind him as he was riding one of the two dead men’s horses back in the direction of Apache Springs…and oats, hay, and water.

  The horse had looked a little sheepish, following along from about thirty yards back, keeping its head down, ears pinned back. Rather than ride double with a dead man, Yakima had mounted the zebra and rode it back to town.

  Now he gave an indifferent grunt as, pressing his left hand against the bullet wound in his left side, he stepped around the kid and dropped to his knees before the stock trough fronting the jail office. As per his morning duties, Galveston had filled the trough with fresh water only a couple of hours ago. Yakima brushed his hat off, letting it tumble into the dirt, and plunged his head in
to the lukewarm water, taking a long drink as he did.

  He lifted his head from the tank and shook it, whipping his long hair out around him, water flying everywhere.

  “You’re hit.”

  Yakima looked at the badly worn boots in the dirt to his left and trailed his eyes up the long, skinny, broadcloth-clad legs and lean waist and chest to the concerned eyes of young Penny scowling down at the bloody stain in his side.

  “Take the fresh beef over to the undertaker, will you?”

  “You best have the doc look at that.”

  “Sutton’s got his hands full.”

  “Still, that don’t look too good. I’d best…”

  “You’d best take these two bushwhackers over to the undertaker’s and--”

  “Yakima!” This time it was a woman’s voice.

  Yakima turned to see Julia making her way over from the Conquistador on the other side of the street and to the west a couple of blocks. She angled toward him, holding the skirts of her expensive, low-cut gown above her side-button shoes, negotiating the heavy mid-day traffic. She narrowed her eyes against the roiling dust, coughing.

  When a small ore wagon pulled by two jackasses passed before her, giving her an opening to Yakima’s side of the street, she hurried up to where the lawman was rising from the dirt and saying, “This day just keeps bunchin’ up on me.” He looked at the young string-bean deputy standing beside him, staring at the hole in the lawman’s side. “Galveston, what did I just tell you to do?”

  “S-Sorry, Marshal!” Galveston gathered up the pack horse’s reins, swung up onto his dun’s back, and booted it up the street, tugging the two pack horses along behind him.

  Julia stopped before Yakima, glowering down at his side. “How bad?”

  “Hell, I—”

  “I know, I know. You’ve cut yourself worse shaving. I highly doubt that. Let’s get you over to Doc Sutton’s.”

  Yakima shook his head. “Doc’s got his hands full with the Rio Grande Kid and the stage passengers. He doesn’t got time for a little bullet burn.”

  Julia gazed pleadingly into his eyes. “Let me take a look at it.”